Table of Contents

Introduction

Memorization

Texts and the Curriculum

Debate

Final Examinations and the Title of Geshe

The Commentarial Hierarchy: Preliminary Studies

Students begin by mastering the techniques and basic concepts necessary to engage in debate. During this period, which usually lasts three years, 25 monks are trained in the art of debate as they study the Collected Topics. They are also introduced to the basic concepts of logic and epistemology that they will use throughout their studies. The texts used are manuals specific to the monastery and contain five parts:

Collected Topics (bsdus grwa) proper (in three parts)
Types of Mind (blo rigs)
Types of Evidence (rtags rigs)

The first three texts of the Collected Topics teach monks the debate’s structure, techniques, and terminology. These introductory manuals provide the key to the practice of debate. 26 The first chapter introduces the students to debate by focusing on the logical relations between colors and showing how these relations can be used in simple debates. Later chapters introduce more sophisticated topics, including the basic outline of the Buddhist conceptual universe and its main categories, and examine logical relations such as exclusion and inclusion. But not all of the topics are important for later studies; several are mere brainteasers introduced purely to sharpen the reasoning abilities of the students. In fact, the real topic of the three volumes of the Collected Topics is training in debate.

That training is completed when epistemology and logic are introduced to the students. The Types of Mind presents the main concepts used in Buddhist epistemology, a subject of great importance in the Ge-luk school. From this genre of text, students learn about the nature of knowledge, its types, and its objects. The Types of Evidence delineates the types of reasoning they must use and begins to supply the different logical tools that will be available to them during their studies. For example, students learn how to distinguish probative arguments from statements of consequence...

This propaedeutic phase of the curriculum is often completed by the study of doxography (grub mtha’, siddhānta, which examines Buddhist and non-Buddhist systems of belief. In this way, students acquire a sense of the shape of the tradition as a whole—its main ideas and its most important distinctions. To help them understand the structure of the Buddhist worldview, students have recourse to another genre of text, the Paths and Stages (sa lam). In this stage, they also study the Seventy Topics (don bdun cu), a summary of the seventy topics covered by the Ornament. Throughout the first part of the curriculum, no in-depth comprehension is expected of the students, who develop their reasoning abilities and learn the basic philosophical vocabulary needed for the rest of their studies. They also acquire a variety of cognitive maps on which they can locate all the ideas that will confront them in the core of the curriculum, the study of the five treatises.

Notes

[25] Monks who have already received some training are often allowed to cover these preliminary classes in one year.

[26] Hence, the Collected Topics are often called the Magical Key to the Path of Reasoning (rigs lam ‘phrul gyi lde mig). See, for example the Se-ra Jay Collected Topics: Pur-bu-jok Jam-ba-gya-tso, Tshad ma’i gzhung don ‘byed pa’i bsdus grwa rnam par bshad pa rigs lam ‘phrul gyi lde mig las rigs lam chung bar tags rigs kyi skor (Palampur, India: Library of Bkra Bshis Rjongs, n.d.). This text is often known as Yongs ‘dzin bsdus grwa (The Collected Topics of the Tutor), because its author was the tutor of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama.